Why are we so confident these are the most detailed maps you’ll ever see from the 2014 Senate elections? Precincts are the smallest level of geography for publicly-reported election results. There were more than 175,000 precincts in the United States in 2012, fifty times the number of counties. The maps here show precinct-level results, where available, from some of the closest Senate races.

Maps exclude early votes in counties that do not report them by precinct. Some precinct boundaries are approximate.

I would call these Pop-Up Infographics, where the map is static, but additional details are shown in a pop-up frame when you hover over each voting precinct.

After you choose your location, the VoteEasy site looks up the candidates specific to your area. By entering your opinions on 12 critical issues and how important each issue is to you, the site shows you which candidates most closely match your beliefs. Some candidates have submitted their answers, and the rest are inferred from the public records.

I made up some answers for New York since I don’t live there and don’t have any opinions on those candidates. The site broke up the candidates into the two different Senate races and a House seat race currently on the ballot:

You can click on a particular candidate to get specific information about them and their political record.

It describes the daily variations on the number of quotations for the top 2 more mentioned candidates, Dilma and Serra. It also points out “of the curve” campaign or media events that took affect on the twitter chattering.

Norton Amato Jr. and his team were gracious enough to translate it into English for readers of Cool Infographics, and here is the original:

From our friends at GOOD transparency, is a simple infographic showing President Obama's worldwide approval rating. I like the use of stamps to help identify the countries around the world, and that the order is representative of highest approval to lowest approval ratings. I think this graphic lacks the use of illustration to convey the data. The actual approval ratings are only communicated with the numbers without any graphic representation.

During the campaign, President Obama argued that his election would help restore the image the rest of the world has of United States. In the six months since his election, his approval ratings at home have slipped, though they remain high. Around the rest of the world, opinion is mixed. A recent study by WorldPublicOpinion.org asked people in 21 countries whether they had confidence that Obama would “do the right thing” when it came to world affairs. Our latest Transparency is a look at their responses.

One other criticism would be that the text implies that we should be looking at how worldwide opinion has changed since Obama's election, but the data is actually only a snapshot of opinions six months after the election. No indication is this is higher or lower than the opinions at the time of his election.

I don't think I've ever posted about Wordle.net. So I thought this word cloud of President Barack Obama's inaugural address yesterday would be a good example.

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Since today is Election Day, the nytimes.com has a neat feature that lets you create your own Electoral Map. Ireally like that it also gives you the option (seen above) to view the country with teh states sized by electoral votes or by geography (below).

It's been preloaded with the NYTimes.com breakdown of how the states may fall today, and which states are still undecided. It's a little misleading because there are more undecided states, but they have assumed they will lean as the have historically. It also allows you to change them on your own so you can see the effect on the overall election.

When your done playing, you can also see the NYTimes version of the map that includes the states that are leaning, but are not yet truly decided.

As you can see, the NYTimes.com site is predicting a Democratic win. Let's see what really happens today.

Staying on the presidential election theme, here's a great infographic on infochimps.org. Red shows newspapers endorsing McCain, and Blue show newspapers endorsing Obama. The inner color of each circle also represents which candidate the newspaper endorsed in the 2004 election. The size of the circle represents each newspapers circulation.

Also notice the mismatch between the newspaper endorsement and each state's "Red vs. Blue" alignment.

Sticking with the stuff from GOOD magazine, this is one of the GOOD Sheets available for sale as a poster at Starbucks for a limited time. I've been looking for some good election related graphics. There are a ton out there, but I'm looking for the gems.

I hear all the time that people don't think their vote matters, and in some cases it may get lost in an election that isn't close or competitive. However, you never actually know if a race is going to be close or not (unless there is only one candidate).

In some of our local elections, I've seen some decisions put up to vote that won by only 12 votes!

I'm not pushing any specific politcal opinion, just that everyone should get out and vote. Early voting is already open in many areas, so do your part and be heard!

What most of the doom-and-gloom reports on our economy don’t provide is perspective—a historical survey of an economy that’s been through more than a few ups and downs in its day. Here’s a farsighted view of how our temperamental economic machine works, and a close-up of how it stands today.

"Death and Taxes:2009" is a representational poster of the federal discretionary budget; the amount of money that is spent at the discretion of your elected representatives in Congress. Basically, your federal income taxes. The data is from the President's budget request for 2009. It will be debated, amended, and approved by Congress by October 1st to begin the fiscal year.

The poster provides a uniquely revealing look at our national priorities, that fluctuate yearly, according to the wishes of the President, the power of Congress, and the will of the people. If you pay taxes, then you have paid for a small part of everything in the poster.

The Death and Taxes poster from 2007 was my initial post on Cool Infographics, so I'm very excited to see this update. Now the 2009 version is available to purchase as a poster here.